Who survivors look back to Quadrophenia

The Who’s Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey haven’t stayed off the road during the past four-plus years by choice.

“We’ve been trying to find something we can do together. We’ve struggled to find something to do,” guitarist and songwriter Townshend explains, with vocalist Daltrey nodding beside him. Then the man who wrote one of rock ’n’ roll’s most famous lyrics – “Hope I die before I get old” for 1965’s “My Generation” — quips, “We’ve been anxious to work together – before we drop dead.”

Daltrey can only laugh.The Who – at least the duo that’s left of the iconic British rock group after the deaths of drummer Keith Moon and John Entwistle – have returned this year to “Quadrophenia,” the 1973 rock opera that Townshend and Daltrey celebrated last year with the release of deluxe editions of the set. Their Quadrophenia & More Tour features the album in its entirety – with extensive video production including tributes to Moon and Entwistle — plus an encore set of Who favorites such as “Baba O’Riley,” “Who Are You,” “Pinball Wizard” and others.

It’s not the first time they’ve done it — The Who, with Entwistle, took the rock opera on the road in 1996-97 — but Townshend and Daltrey are excited to revisit it.

“What’s great about doing it now is it’s still a work in progress,” explains Daltrey, 68. “Hopefully it will keep developing, and we might even get it into some really kind of up-to-date, modern show different from what we had back in ’97.”

And because it’s a strenuous batch of songs for a vocalist, Daltrey — who hosted The Who’s last performance of “Quadrophenia,” at a 2010 Teenage Cancer Trust benefit in London — is also anxious to do it again while his pipes are up to the challenge.

“I don’t know how many years I’m going to be able to sing this music,” he acknowledges. “My voice is great at the moment, so I’m just going to explore the possibility that one time I might sing ‘Quadrophenia’ and it will actually be a little easier.” He’ll have more to do this time, too, since The Who won’t be employing the special guest vocalists (including Gary Glitter, Billy Idol and PJ Proby) to sing certain songs as it did during the mid-’90s tour.

Townshend, 67, notes he’s “very aware” he created “a taxing vocal piece — and not just the obvious tracks like ‘Love, Reign O’er Me,’ which is a vocal tour de force, but all of them.” For “Quadrophenia’s” composer, however, performing the album is “very easy.”

“I wrote it pretty much all on guitar,” Townshend explains. “There were a few keyboard bits, but everything falls under my fingers. It flows very natural for me. It’s a very graceful piece for me to perform, so I love performing it as a piece, and it kind of flies by. I love playing it.”

“Quadrophenia” itself was a labor of love when Townshend wrote it in early 1973 and recorded it during the spring at a pair of studios in London.

Set in the Mod youth era of Britain circa 1964-65, a scene the four Who members were part of and that gave the band its earliest support, it tracks the story of Jimmy, who struggles with a “quadrophonic” personal disorder and is searching for a sense of identity. It may seem complex, and it’s decidedly British in its cultural reference points, but Townshend and Daltrey both feel “Quadrophenia” has a universal appeal that’s helped the album’s popularity endure during the past nearly three decades.

“I think it’s easy to understand; we all go through adolescence and trying to find out how you are, and hopefully you get to that point quite soon after your teens,” Daltrey explains, quipping that, “obviously some people are in their 30s before they get there — maybe even their 70s. But that kind of story doesn’t change.”

Townshend adds that, for him, the “poignancy” of “Quadrophenia” is that “it connects me to my younger days. I certainly don’t have nostalgia for the Mod days, but there’s poignancy to being reconnected to all those feelings. We were a very young band when we started in 1963, ‘64, playing to those audience. We were just kids.

“So when we play it now, it reconnects me with the crowds that come to see us — some of whom were old Mods and some of whom are much, much younger. But it seems to have some relevance, some potency still.”

And, Townshend adds, the “Quadrophenia” story rings as true in 2012 as it did in 1973, or a decade before.

“This is about a young man that doesn’t fit in,” he explains. “With everybody now communicating through texting, through emails, through Facebook, all kinds of social media, one of the difficulties of that is if it’s not a place where you can be absolutely authentic to yourself, you will have great difficulty when you try to, in a sense, mature, grow, move on.

“That’s what ‘Quadrophenia’ is about. It’s about this young man who realizes that he hasn’t quite solved the problems of growing up, and what he has to do is sit and offer it up the universe. That’s all he can do. And I can well imagine there are kids, young people all over the planet at the moment coming to that point in their lives, putting the computer aside and being by themselves and wondering what it’s like to sit in the rain and pray. I can certainly imagine that’s going on.”

“Quadrophenia’s” after-life includes a 1979 film version that’s been released on DVD a couple of times, while Townshend says Bill Curbishley, The Who’s current manager, is producing a sequel. And a documentary, “The Who: Quadrophenia — Can You See the Real Me? The Story Behind the Album,” was shown on TV in the U.K. and in movie theaters in North America during the summer.

Townshend – who published a memoir, “Who I Am,” last month – has returned to long-form musical storytelling with “Floss,” a project he’s momentarily put aside for the Quadrophenia & More tour, but that he plans to resume in 2013. But he remains circumspect about whether it will be for The Who – or if, in fact, he’ll anticipate any new music at all in the future.

“I’m writing all the time,” Townshend says. “The only thing is I’m not sure whether what I write today you can rubber stamp as Who music — although on (2006’s ‘Endless Wire’) what we found was Roger and I, as The Who, can apply that to whatever I write and we’ll see what happens.

“It’s a weird thing; we get to a kind of place where we go, ‘Is this The Who or not?’ All I can do is write the music and pass it to Roger.”

Daltrey, for his part, has no such qualms.

“I think whatever (Townshend) writes, even if it’s a piece of jazz … If it’s got words and he plays it and I sing it, that’s Who music. That’ll do me. So,” he adds with a laugh, “give it here!